‘Quest’ by Aaron Becker- Beautiful effort, but not as good as ‘Journey’

In the course of my studies recently on wordless picturebooks I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of this book to our bookshelves.Quest is the follow up book to Journey by Aaron Becker. These books are part of a trilogy, the last book in the series coming out sometime in the future. It is often the case in film s and books where the sequel disappoints, and this doesn’t break that trend.

This book follows on from the first one, where the children in the story must find seven magic colours to free the captured King in the imaginative city the story is set in. The children must travel to different areas to find these colours. The book is exquisitely illustrated. Becker has a real talent with watercolours. The scenes are done in minute detail and I found myself pausing on some pages to take in all the effort the illustrator had put into the objects displayed on the page.

Colour is a massive part of this book series, the ‘real’ world which the boy and girl live in are full of drab brownish hues symbolizing boredom and monotony, they both possess markers which as brightly coloured which have the power to draw special things. The imaginative world they enter is really vibrantly coloured and one can only marvel at some of the drawings like such:

I enjoyed this book but I mist say I was a little disappointed. Journey was a breathe of fresh air when it first came out as it was different and aesthetically it was near perfection with it’s warm colours coupled with expansive landscapes of a different world. Quest however is more or less the same book, I know books in a series have to have links but I looked forward to viewing a different kind of world, and a more original story. Journey was interesting as we did not know where the story could bring us but the story in Quest is so linear, the colours are going to be found and the king is going to freed, there is no complication as such. I feel the beauty of wordless picturebooks is that there is a wide room for interpretation in the images. In this book I felt the scope for interpretation was limited .

Did you read Becker’s books? I don’t think anyone can argue against the illustrators talent or the books beauty. I enjoyed this book but not as much as I did with Journey. I look forward to seeing more of Beckers book, I love going on his website http://www.storybreathing.com to see how he puts his book together. He’s an interesting man!